1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a vehicle unit for controlling vehicle functions, for example a central vehicle control unit, a multimedia vehicle unit or the like, and to a method for operating this vehicle unit. As customary, the vehicle unit has a microprocessor with a connected memory, a main operating system (OS) being implemented on the microprocessor. According to the invention, the main operating system forms the interface between the hardware of the vehicle control unit and application programs (applications) implemented in the main system and/or possibly also additionally implemented on the microprocessor and user interactions via a user interface.
2. Related Art
Such electronic vehicle units are being increasingly used in vehicles, with application programs which are controlled by user inputs or hardware components connected to the vehicle Unit or both being installed on the vehicle units. Such open systems are likely to result in the main operating system and/or application programs on the vehicle unit no longer operating under certain conditions, for example on account of errors when writing to the memory connected in the vehicle unit. Such problems may arise in the case of too many rollback memory accesses to earlier memory entries or during program addition or deletion actions. It is then often necessary to reinstall the main operating system and possibly the application programs. This reinstallation is very complicated for original equipment manufacturers, intermediaries and end customers because the vehicle unit must be removed from the vehicle and sent to a repair service which must then rewrite the memory in a process which is also referred to as “flashing” in order to reimplement the main operating system and possibly the application programs on the microprocessor.